BartGrantham.com

Jim Wiscarson was the man's name. And that's pretty much all I know about him.

In the 90's my friends and I wasted far too much of our young adulthood blowing each other up with 3D Realms' Duke Nukem 3D. It was a tremendous amount of fun, and no other networked game has really felt quite as good to play to me as it still does. Even now, every few years when the opportunity strikes we'll fire up the modern ports of the game and drop right back into the fray, cackling with laughter long into the night.

What really kicked off the marathon Duke sessions was the discovery of FTP sites that had user-authored. Some were designed for one-person playability but most were for death matches, which was perfect for us. After downloading and trying out over a hundred of these maps, we noticed that we gravitated toward a set of maps with the filename "BARTMAP1.MAP", "BARTMAP2.MAP", and so on up to "BARTMP11.MAP". Despite the name, I had nothing to do with their authorship.

If it isn't an "old adage", it should be: it can take as long or longer to undo something as it did to do it in the first place.

If all planning took this into account the world would be a better place.

Or at least the tech industry.

A few weeks ago our AppleTV suddenly, without warning, lost almost all of the menu items under its "TV" tab. The only option there was to watch episodes we had already downloaded. No browsing a store, "top shows", or anything of the sort. It was odd and surprising. One minute we were watching a show we had just downloaded and when the show was over and it dropped us into the menu we were missing key functionality.

In the troubleshooting process I tried rebooting, resetting, and finally, a factory restore. The AppleTV UI obviously keys off of data downloaded from the iTunes store so that it can provide an up-to-date storefront. What I hadn't realized was that the core menu system was ALSO driven over the network from the iTunes store. Once the factory restore was complete I was staring at the original AppleTV UI (I had forgotten how much worse it was) and... the menu was still missing almost all the entries!

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple as part of the NeXT acquisition in February of 1997, AAPL was trading around $4 a share.

When he took over as "Interim CEO" in July of that year, it was trading around $3.60.

When he resigned his position as CEO today after 14 years in the role, the stock closed at $376.18, a hundredfold increase, and with a market capitalization greater than almost every other company on the planet.

I'm going to make a crazy prediction based on zero inside knowledge whatsoever: The iPhone 5 will have a similar form factor as the iPhone 3/iPhone 3GS, but instead of a plastic back it will be molded out of Liquidmetal.